This paper presents a Basque corpus where Verbal Multiword Expressions (VMWEs) were annotated following universal guidelines. Information on the annotation is given, and some ideas for discussion upon the guidelines are also proposed. The corpus is useful not only for NLP-related research, but also to draw conclusions on Basque phraseology in comparison with other languages.

In this paper, we present the NewsReader MEANTIME corpus, a semantically annotated corpus of Wikinews articles. The corpus consists of 480 news articles, i.e. 120 English news articles and their translations in Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. MEANTIME contains annotations at different levels. The document-level annotation includes markables (e.g. entity mentions, event mentions, time expressions, and numerical expressions), relations between markables (modeling, for example, temporal information and semantic role labeling), and entity and event intra-document coreference. The corpus-level annotation includes entity and event cross-document coreference. Semantic annotation on the English section was performed manually; for the annotation in Italian, Spanish, and (partially) Dutch, a procedure was devised to automatically project the annotations on the English texts onto the translated texts, based on the manual alignment of the annotated elements; this enabled us not only to speed up the annotation process but also provided cross-lingual coreference. The English section of the corpus was extended with timeline annotations for the SemEval 2015 TimeLine shared task. The “First CLIN Dutch Shared Task” at CLIN26 was based on the Dutch section, while the EVALITA 2016 FactA (Event Factuality Annotation) shared task, based on the Italian section, is currently being organized.

We present a new morphological processor for Biscayan, a dialect of Basque, developed on the description of the morphology of standard Basque. The database for the standard morphology has been extended for dialects and an open-source tool for morphological description named foma is used for building the processor. Biscayan is a dialect of the Basque language spoken mainly in Biscay, a province on the western of the Basque Country. The description of the lexicon and the morphotactics (or word grammar) for the standard Basque was carried out using a relational database and the database has been extended in order to include dialectal variants linked to the standard entries. XuxenB, a spelling checker/corrector for this dialect, is the first application of this work. Additionally to the basic analyzer used for spelling, a new transducer is included. It is an enhanced analyzer for linking standard form with the corresponding standard ones. It is used in correction for generation of proposals when in the input text appear standard forms which we want to replace with dialectal forms.

This project combines linguistic and statistical information to develop a term extraction tool for Basque. Being Basque an agglutinative and highly inflected language, the treatment of morphosyntactic information is vital. In addition, due to late unification process of the language, texts present more elevated term dispersion than in a highly normalized language. The result is a semi-automatic terminology extraction tool based on XML, for its use in technical and scientific information managing.